Dark Legacy: Human rights under the Marcos regime

By Alfred McCoy, 20 September 1999

Dear Folks—

Al McCoy, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison and one of the foremost researchers/analysts of developments
in the Philippines, recently gave a paper on torture in the
Philippines during the Marcos regime that has really touched a nerve
in that society. What most people do not know is that none of the
torturers—nor many of the regime's allies—have every
been punished for their activities under the dictator. In fact, Fidel
Ramos, who commanded the Philippine Constabulary during the
dictatorship—under which was located a couple of key torture
units—was elected President and served from 1992-1998.

However, while focused on the Philippines, McCoy draws out some
implications that go far beyond that individual country, and that is
why I am posting this so widely. Certainly, it will have implications
for Indonesia, and every other country where torture has been
practiced—including the United States. Despite the unsavory
topic, I encourage everyone to read his notes for the talk, which are
below. I encourage you to forward them on to relevant people around
the world.

In response to my request, Professor McCoy has agreed that I can post
these notes. This talk is extracted from his forthcoming book,
Closer Than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military
Academy (New Haven: Yale University Press), which will be out in
January 2000.

I have read much of McCoy's published work over the years, and
have found it top-flight. If his name sounds familiar, he was the
writer who published The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia
in the early 1970s, detailing CIA complicity with drug lords in the
Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. [The CIA transported the product
of opium poppy to labs in Bangkok, where it was processed into heroin,
and then transported to Saigon and other countries around the world.
It ended up in the arms of a considerable number of US soldiers and
sailors in the region as well.] He has continued writing on the drug
networks, as well as on the Philippines, since then.

In solidarity—

Kim Scipes

DARK LEGACY: HUMAN RIGHTS UNDER THE MARCOS REGIME

Alfred W. McCoy, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Conference: Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship
Ateneo de Manila University
20 September 1999

I. INTRODUCTION:

1.) Marcos Regime: Looking back on the military dictatorships of the
1970s and 1980s, the Marcos government appears, by any standard,
exceptional for both the quantity and quality of its violence.

a.) Films such as Missing and Kiss of the Spider Woman
lend an aura of ruthlessness to Latin American dictatorships that
seems to overshadow the Philippines.

2.) But it still exceeds the 2,115 extra-judicial deaths under General
Pinochet in Chile, and the 266 dead during the Brazilian junta.

3.) Under Marcos, moreover, military murder was the apex of a pyramid
of terror—3,257 killed, 35,000 tortured, and 70,000 incarcerated.

4.) In striking contrast to Argentina, only 737 Filipinos
disappeared between 1975 and 1985.

5.) But nearly four times that number, some 2,520, or 77 percent of all
victims, were salvaged—that is, tortured, mutilated, and
dumped on a roadside for public display.

c.) Seeing these mutilated remains, passers-by could read in a glance a
complete transcript of what had transpired in Marcos's safe houses,
spreading a sense of fear.

1.) Instead of an invisible machine like the Argentine military that
crushed all resistance, Marcos's regime intimidated by random
displays of its torture victims —becoming thereby a theater
state of terror.

d.) This terror had a profound impact upon the Philippine military and
its wider society.

2.) Martial Law: Under martial law from 1972 to 1986, the Philippine
military was the fist of Ferdinand Marcos's authoritarian rule. Its
elite torture units became his instruments of terror.

1.) On 22 September 1972, Marcos, weighing his words with a lawyer's
care, issued Proclamation 1081 imposing a state of martial law that
would last a decade. Let us mark his words. Let us note their nuance:

a.) By virtue of the power vested upon me by...the Constitution I
do hereby command the Armed Forces of the Philippines to maintain law
and order...and to enforce obedience to all laws and decrees, orders
and regulations promulgated by me personally. 2.) The president,
armed with these extraordinary powers, involved the military in every
aspect of authoritarian rule—media censorship, corporate
management, mass incarceration, and provincial administration.

a.) Backed by his generals, Marcos wiped out warlord armies, closed
Congress, and confiscated the corporations of political enemies.

4.) Even at its peak, however, the Marcos state, reflecting the
underlying poverty of Philippine society, lacked the skilled manpower
and information systems to effect a blanket repression.

a.) As a lawyer, moreover, Marcos, at first maintained a facade of
legality and spoke with pride of his constitutional
authoritarianism.

b.) But as the gap between legal fiction and coercive reality widened,
the regime mediated this contradiction by releasing its political
prisoners and shifting to extra-judicial execution or
salvaging.

II. TORTURE & TRAUMA:

1.) Elite Torture Units: During 14 years of martial law, the elite
anti-subversion units came to personify the regime's violent
capacities:

a.) Under the command of Marcos's close cousin General Fidel
Ramos, the Philippine Constabulary housed the 5th Constabulary
Security Unit (CSU) and the Metrocom Intelligence and Security Group
(MISG).

b.) Officers in these elite units were the embodiment of an otherwise
invisible terror.

1.) The MISG's commander for twelve years, Colonel Rolando
Abadilla (PMA '65), in the words of his obituary, towered over
other heavies in that closed, tight-knit, psychotic club of
martial-law enforcers.

2.) Only his former understudy, then Lieutenant , now Congressman,
Rodolfo Aguinaldo (PMA '72) of the 5th CSU, could rival his
psychopathic interrogations.

c.) Instead of a simple physical brutality, these units practiced a
distinctive form of psychological torture with wider implications for
the military and its society.

1.) Let us talk a bit about torture.

d.) Starting in 1950, the US Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA,
funded several decades of academic research into the relative
usefulness of drugs, electroshock, violence, and other coercive
techniques to discover a new method of psychological
torture—perhaps the most significant revolution in this cruel
science during the past four centuries.

1.) Instead of the soldier's natural inclination to physical
brutality, the CIA's thousand-page torture manual, distributed to
military regimes in Latin America for over 20 years, teaches
psychological tactics to break down what the Agency called a
victim's capacity to resist.

2.) Through persistent manipulation of time, the interrogator
can break a victim's will, driving the victim, in the CIA's
words, deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer able
to control his responses in an adult fashion.

3.) Significantly, the Agency did warn that physical torture weakens
the moral caliber of the [security] organization and corrupts those
that rely on it.

4.) But the CIA missed an important point that would emerge from the
Philippine experience: psychological torture is far more corrupting
than its physical variant. e.) These CIA techniques are so similar to
Philippine practices that we must ask: did the CIA train these
Filipino interrogators?

1.) In 1978, a human rights newsletter reported that the Marcos
regime's top torturer, Lieutenant-Colonel Abadilla, was studying
at Fort Leavenworth.

2.) A year later, his understudy, Lieutenant Aguinaldo, was reportedly
going to the United States for...training under the Central
Intelligence Agency.

f.) Were these officers given CIA training in either tactical
interrogation or torture?

1.) Definitive answers must await further release of classified
documents. At present, we will have to content ourselves with
comparison.

2.) Reading the victim's recollections, the methods of Filipino
interrogators, particularly the theatricality of the future RAM
officers, seems strikingly similar to the counter-intuitive techniques
of the CIA manual.

g.) Torture and its terror, designed to inculcate mass compliance
through fear, left a lasting legacy for the post-Marcos
Philippines—a politicized military and a traumatized polity.

2.) AFP & Torture:

a.) The Marcos's regime's spectacle of terror opens us to a
wider understanding of the political dimension of torture—one
that is ignored in the literature on both the human rights and human
psychology.

b.) Instead of studying how torture harms its victims, we must, if we
are to understand the legacy of martial law, ask what impact torture
has upon the torturers.

3.) Theory of Torture:

a.) We are only now coming to an understanding of torture.

b.) In the past quarter century, psychologists have discovered that
torture victims suffer lasting psychological damage out of any
proportion to the actual physical harm.

c.) A study by Otto Doerr-Zegers of Chileans tortured by General
Pinochet's regime found the victim does not only react to
torture with a tiredness of days, weeks, or months, but remains a
tired human being.

1.) These Chilean researchers tried to explain torture's
devastating impact by probing the peculiar phenomenology of the
torture situation.

2.) These researchers seem to be saying that torture, as done in
Chile, was a kind of total theater, a constructed unreality of lies
and inversion.

d.) If torture somehow leaves the victim in a lasting state of
weakness, might it not have the opposite impact upon the perpetrators?

e.) In the Philippines, Marcos' elite interrogation units
practiced a distinctive form of theatrical torture that I call the
drama of social inversion—a variant that relies more on
psychological humiliation than simple physical pain.

1.) Through psychological manipulation and sexual torture, these young
Filipino officers broke their social superiors, priest and professors,
gaining a superman sense that they could remake the social order at
will.

f.) The Philippine experience teaches us that torture has a
transactional dynamic—just as the torture victim is made
powerless, so the torturer is empowered.

4.) Torture & Class '71:

a.) We can best see the impact of torture on the Armed Forces by
examining the experience of the Philippine Military Academy's
Class of 1971.

b.) Only 18 months after their graduation, Marcos declared martial
making these young lieutenants the fist of his repression.

c.) Whether war, peace, or military dictatorship, generals keep to
their tents, while lieutenants serve on the line and suffer its fate.

d.) From the time of its founding in 1936, the Philippine state's
primary defense against coups has been the socialization of its
officers into subordination at the PMA.

1.) For Filipino officers, the first years of active duty are a
second, critical phase in this process of military socialization.

e.) Whether they became Marcos loyalists or RAM rebels, officers
assigned to these elite anti-subversive units that regularly tortured
suspects seem transformed by the experience.

1.) Many members of Class '71, served as officers fighting the
dirty war against Muslim rebels in Mindanao before transfer to civil
control operations in Manila.

a.) Then Lieutenant, now General, Panfilo Lacson, for example, joined
the MISG right after graduation and spent the next 15 years in this
elite torture unit, rising to deputy command under his mentor Colonel
Abadilla.

f.) What was the impact of torture upon the young officers?

1.) When torture becomes duty and officers spend years in a daily
routine of terror, the experience becomes central to their
socialization.

2.) Such experiences broke down their socialization into
subordination, transforming them from servants of the state into its
would-be masters.

3.) Judging from RAM's later coups, these experiences also seemed
to foster a theory of social action founded on an inflated belief in
the efficacy of violence.

g.) Group torture built lasting bonds that sustained these officers in
their rise to power.

a.) At the 5th CSU, Lt. Aguinaldo (PMA '72) worked with his
classmate Billy Bibit and Vic Batac ('71), beating victims
together and forging bonds that later knitted into the RAM.

b.) Similarly, at the rival MISG, Colonel Abadilla and two comrades,
Robert Ortega and Panfilo Lacson , tortured together for over a
decade, forming a tight faction that would rise together within the
police after Marcos's downfall.

5.) Emergence of RAM:

a.) In retrospect, the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, or RAM, seems
the most visible manifestation of Marcos's impact upon the
military

b.) Led by middle-ranking regulars largely from PMA's Class of
1971, RAM plotted a coup d'tat against the Marcos dictatorship in
1986.

6.) Torture & RAM's Coup Tactics:

a.) After a decade as understudies in Marcos's theater of terror,
the RAM colonels emerged on the national stage in the late 1980s
emboldened by the sense of mastery to launch six coup attempts.

b.) Not only did torture inspire their many coups, it induced an
illusory sense of personal power that made them inept tacticians and
incompetent coup commanders.

c.) No other military in the world launched so many coups with so
little success. 7.) Impunity: After five more failed coup attempts
between 1986 and 1990, surrender remained the only option for
RAM's leaders.

a.) Facing charges for crimes of murder and rebellion, the RAM
colonels were determined to lay down arms in ways that would guarantee
immunity.

b.)Through a mix of bluff and violence, they not only won an absolute
amnesty but they had also placed their leader in the
Senate—launching him on a path to the presidency of the
Philippine Republic.

8.) RAM: In October 1995, the rebels of the RAM, or the Reform the
Armed Forces Movement, and government representatives met at Camp
Aguinaldo to sign a peace agreement ending the group's seven-year
revolt.

1.) Under the terms of the accord, RAM agreed to a permanent
cessation of hostilities and promised to commit itself to
democratic processes.

2.) In exchange, the government would reinstate all rebel soldiers
into the armed forces and grant a general and unconditional amnesty
for all offenses committed in pursuit of their political beliefs.

3.) After years of maneuvering to escape prosecution, RAM had finally
won impunity for crimes of rebellion, murder, and torture.

9.) Police: Though RAM and its spectacular coups have now faded, the
legacy of martial law lives on in the Philippine National Police
(PNP).

a.) Whether rebels or loyalists, members of Class '71 in the PNP
have continued to their relentless rise to power, though often guilty
of serious human rights abuses.

b.) In 1991, then Defense Secretary Fidel Ramos merged the
Constabulary with local police to form the new Philippine National
Police (PNP).

1.) Since there was no investigation of past human rights abuses,
torture and salvaging have continued inside the PNP.

2.) In 1997, the last full year of the Ramos presidency, the AFP
recorded only 81 human rights violations, while the PNP were
responsible for 1,074—43 percent of the nation's total.

c.) Under President Estrada, Class '71 has continued its rise to
power within the PNP.

1.) In the first months of his administration, President Estrada began
appointing members of Class '71 to key regional and national
commands, making them the most powerful cohort in the PNP.

2.) Among the many promoted were three classmates who personify the
successive stages of Class '71's descent into violence.

a.) The new PNP regional commander for Northern Mindanao, Ruben
Cabagnot, was responsible for the hazing death of a plebe at the PMA.

b.) The PNP commander for Central Mindanao, Tiburcio Fusilero, did 40
assassinations for Marcos and led RAM's 1989 coup in Cebu.

c.) The commander of the powerful Presidential Task Force on Organized
Crime, Panfilo Lacson, was deputy director of the notorious MISG and
was indicted in 1995 for the brutal massacre of 11 suspects in his
custody.

3.) Other members of Class '71 with questionable records were also
promoted the PNP—notably General Victor Batac, a Marcos-era torturer
and the chief strategist of RAM's revolt.

III. IMPUNITY & CIVIL SOCIETY:

1.) The Philippine military has thus, like its counterparts in
Argentina and Chile, achieved impunity for its crimes and
coups.

a.) As a recent phenomenon, impunity is a little understood process
with far-reaching ramifications.

b.) At the VI International Symposium on Torture at Buenos Aires in
1993, delegates defined impunity as the fact that, even in
countries where dictatorship has given way to democratic rule, many
torturers and other violators of human rights go unpunished.

c.) In some nations, the military wins impunity directly by
negotiation and in others, such as the Philippines, indirectly by
forcing a political stalemate.

2.) Impunity in the Philippines: More than any other nation, the
Philippines provides an example of extreme impunity.

a.) Even in the most difficult of transitions from dictatorship, many
of these new, weak democracies have still managed to win concessions
to justice.

b.) From remembering to forgetting, from punishment to amnesty,
different countries have tried different ways coping with the
collective burden of a traumatic past.

1.) South Africa confronted the past with a non-punitive Truth
Commission.

2.) South Korea imposed harsh prison terms upon former presidents.

3.) Argentina tried to silence its past until pro-democracy forces
forced the formation of a truth commission that produced the famed
report Nunca Mas, or Never Again.

4.) Even today, Indonesia wavers, painfully, between exploring the
excesses of the Suharto era or succumbing to pressures from the old
order to forget. 5.) And the Philippines has tried to forget.

6.) None of these alternatives comes without costs. All inflict
further trauma upon the victims of authoritarianism.

c.) Philippines: In comparison with other post-authoritarian nations,
the Philippines has done very little to punish human rights violators
or purge their influence from the military.

1.) Impunity has left what University of the Philippines historian
Maris Diokno has called the entrenched legacy of martial
law—a lingering collective malaise that, subtlety but
directly, shapes and distorts the nation's political process.

d.) Since Marcos's fall, each succeeding administration has, by
action and inaction, allowed impunity to deepen.

e.) During her first months, President Corazon Aquino appointed four
human-rights lawyers to her cabinet and seemed strongly committed to
the issue.

1.) But battered by repeated coup attempts, she abandoned any attempt
to prosecute the military for past crimes of torture and murder.

f.) Her successor, President Fidel Ramos, transformed impunity from a
de facto to de jure status.

1.) That is, he bestowed the imprimatur of a lasting legality upon an
impunity that had been, under Aquino, a short-term compromise.

2.) Moreover, his administration elevated former torturers to
positions of power.

g.) Most recently, President Joseph Estrada is completing this process
by offering members of the Marcos regime both symbol and substance of
exoneration. 3.) Hawaii Case: Finding the Philippine courts and Human
Rights Commission unsympathetic, some 10,000 Filipino torture victims
mounted a massive litigation against Marcos in the US federal courts.

1.) As President Ramos moved towards an absolute amnesty for torturers
between 1992 and 1995, the US District Court for Hawaii was
aggressively pursuing a massive class-action suit against the Marcos
estate—providing Filipino victims justice that they were being
denied at home.

a.) In September 1992, the US District Court in Honolulu found Marcos
guilty of systematic torture and held his estate liable for damages to
all 9,541 victims—later awarding nearly $2 Billion in damages,
the biggest personal injury verdict in legal history.

b.) In January 1995, President Ramos sparked controversy by announcing
that his government would oppose awarding Marcos's Swiss assets to
these torture victims.

c.) In an angry editorial, The Philippine Daily Inquirer,
blasted the moral bankruptcy of the Ramos administration's
position. In a biting, personal attack on the president, the paper
reminded him that as commander of the Constabulary under Marcos it
was his men who were conducting the dreaded evening arrests, who were
applying the water cure to extract confessions and administered
electrical shocks to genitals of political detainees.

4.) Between the poles of local impunity and global justice, the
Philippines emerged from the first decade of the post-Marcos period
with signs of a lingering trauma.

a.) The activist ex-priest Edicio de la Torre has sensed, since
Marcos's fall in 1986, a deep need for reconciliation among both
victims and perpetrators.

5.) This jarring juxtaposition—between the US granting justice
to Filipino victims and their own government's attempt to deny
it—indicates that the trauma of Marcos's terror remains
deeply imbedded within society's collective memory and
institutional fabric.

6.) Freed from judicial review, the torturers of the Marcos era have
continued to rise within the police and intelligence bureaucracies,
allowing the pervasive brutality of martial law to persist.

7.) Under impunity, culture and politics are recasting the past,
turning cronies into statesmen, torturers into legislators, and
killers into generals.

8.) Beneath the surface of a restored democracy, the Philippines,
through the compromises of impunity, still suffers the legacy of the
Marcos era—a collective trauma and an ingrained institutional
habit of human rights abuse.

IV. CONCLUSION:

1.) As the Philippines reaches for rapid economic growth, it cannot, I
would argue, afford to ignore the issue of human rights.

2.) If the Philippines is to recover its full fund of social
capital after the trauma of dictatorship, it needs to adopt some
means for remembering, recording, and, ultimately, reconciliation.

3.) No nation can develop its full economic potential without a high
level of social capital, and social capital cannot, as Robert Putnam
teaches us, grow in a society without a sense of justice.